The dirt of my dreams. Of my dreams! We’re having a thaw — today was gorgeous, sixty-five degrees, sun shining, a little windy but then again, this is Livingston and we’re used to wind. So outside I went, spading fork in hand, to turn over some dirt. Now my last garden, in California, was a wonderland of clay. Turning over soil was a marathon activity which often involved me standing on my spade, bouncing up and down, trying to wiggle it into the dirt. And my first garden was in Telluride, at nearly 9000 feet with a 45 day growing…
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Things you can do instead of planning Part Two of your new novel. I finished Part One the other day … well I didn’t exactly “finish” it but I do have a draft that seems sort of alive and is stable enough that I have to stop tinkering with it and go on to the next part of the book. I’m trying not to dwell on the fact that it’s taken me almost four years to get to this point, nor to dwell on the fact that I’m back at the edge of terra incongnita, that place where I have…
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Seeds for Hope I sent off my seed orders the other day. Winter came late to Montana this year, but it’s here now, and with a vengence. It’s been snowing all week, and cold. The kind of grey winter weather where there is no horizon, just blowing white snow broken by the occasional grey-brown windbreak of dormant cottonwood trees. It is most certainly the dead of winter, and for the first time ever, now that I have a yard where I can really sink a garden in, I got to sit down and fill out the seed orders. I’ve been…
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Living Small in Eastern Europe My father, Jim Freeman, has lived in the Czech Republic since 1992 or so, and although for a number of years we didn’t really hear from him much, over the last couple of years he and I have developed a nice email relationship. Dad sent his last weekend, and since I have a weakness for draft horses, I thought I’d add it to the blog (although be advised, no one calls me “Char” except that handful of people who knew me before I was six): Dear Char— Seems I ought to share my day with…
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Crisis of Faith at LivingSmall Well, I’ve been having something of a crisis of faith about this whole blogging thing — not about blogging itself, but rather, about how on earth blogging about my own tiny little corner of the universe could in any way be a meaningful activity in the face of the global crisis into which our government is leading us. I mean really, we’re going to war and I’m blogging about cleaning? about floor machines? Compared to really insightful bloggers like Body and Soul, or Rittenhouse, or Blue Streak, or the Nielsen Haydens at Electrolite and Making…